Early this morning, I headed down the back porch steps to take pictures in the garden. I happened to notice the tiniest little snail creeping along the sandstone path. I stepped over it and went about my business, assuming it would do the same. When I headed back along the path, I looked for it. While it had made progress, I wasn’t sure it was going to be able to stay out of the way, so I picked it up and moved it in the direction I thought it was going and went back up the steps feeling as if I had done a good deed.
Much later in the day, when I was scrolling through my pictures to see what I wanted to put up for my Garden Walk post on Facebook, I saw the picture of the snail. I found myself wondering if I had moved that tiny creature towards its goal or away from its goal. By that point I had read a Substack note by Pri1 “sometimes I feel like my life is being written by someone who isn’t sure they like me or not”, one of those notes that was rattling around, keeping me company, asking me questions and waiting for answers.
I’m at the age where for whatever reason I get asked for advice. I have to be honest that I often find myself giving advice whether I’ve been asked or not. There was a time right after I retired when I felt like I had information others needed. Primarily I tried to pass on what I felt like I was learning as I struggled with the adjustments that come when one who has always worked suddenly has free time. That advice was often well taken, and I felt like it had value. Of late, however, I had been going over the questions I’d been getting from my young adult grandchildren and fretting if I was telling them what they needed to know or if I was telling them what I needed to say.
I define advice as my sharing my opinion on what might be a good idea. I am firmly committed to the position that each and every one of us should do what we think is best at the moment, and I’ve always felt that what might be best at the moment is to gather information. Gathering information can include researching online as well as asking others who may or may not have been in the same situation. I also believe it is important to use your own critical thinking skills and respectfully decline to follow someone else’s input even if you requested said input. My grandchildren, for example, know that there is a possibility the advice of a 70 year old woman might be outdated for a 20-something individual. My hope is that some aspect of the information might lead to some serious thought on the topic, and that the thought process could lead to a workable solution.
Which brings me back to the snail, the picture that was haunting me. I’d seen it, or one like it, on that sandstone path on more than one occasion. I actually had no idea what the snail was trying to accomplish. I had no idea where it was going or why it was going there. Generally with my grandchildren I have enough experience having been in their lives since birth to have at least a partial idea where they are headed, or at least where they think they are headed, or even where I think they should be headed. The snail and I were total strangers. The snail was, in fact, in the perfect position to wonder why something it could not possibly grasp had moved it in a way that defied its understanding of the Snail Universe, leading it to ponder whether Life was being directed by someone or something that isn’t sure if it liked it or not. I was putting myself in a position to be that someone or something, and truth be told, I was only moving it because stepping on it would leave ick on my shoe as well as a tiny bit of guilt over sending it, as they say to avoid using the words death and killed, across the rainbow bridge. Add to all this that I had, in fact, taken its picture, making it a part of my Human Universe which in my now mind-numbing ponderment upped the game rapidly nearing the analogy based analysis I fall into when I think of my young adult grandchildren and with the snail morphing into the total strangers who have the misfortune of standing in front of me at the grocery store and asking some question that leads me to expound on the condition of the grocery store world around us at the moment. So…
I turned off my phone, took the long way around the porch to go back into the house, in order to pour myself a cup of coffee. Coffee, in these confusing analogy analysis laden situations that get me entangled with reality and push me to try to write something, always helps.
Another awesome musing! I'll never look at snails the same way again. ;-)